BradyWhite.net

Aspire - Product Designer

Aspire has revolutionized the way youth sporting pictures are taken.  Providing a green screen allows the players and the parents to design their own posters, shirts, and even trading cards.  At Rain I was the primary Flex developer for Aspire’s product designer.  The designer allows users to design custom posters, shirts, trading cards, team pictures, blankets, and other products.

After being in beta since July 2008, we released the major release of Aspire in September, 2009.

Aspire’s business model is unique.  … Continue Reading

Photo Scaled 200% inside ImageWell. 50 dpi.

Custom book builders are great rich internet applications that we’ve made at Rain. One core component of custom book builders is allowing users to upload their own photos. The most common user error is uploading and using a photo that cannot be printed at a high quality print resolution. It is our job to let the user know if the image he or she has selected for a particular ImageWell (a rectangle where a photo can be … Continue Reading

In doing some research on filters in SVG I came across some new information regarding SVG. The reason that they have upgraded/changed focus for the SVG format to FXG was triggered when developing Thermo. They started using SVG and then they realized how difficult (and eventually deemed impossible) it was to easily translate SVG to Flash smoothly. So they developed FXG for Thermo & Flex 4 to replace SVG. Now we can just use FXG’s DropShadowFilter instead of copying the bitmap, offsetting it, applying a color fliter, blurring it, and then blending it.

What is FXG?
“FXG 1.0 … Continue Reading

Adobe Student Rep for RIA

Yesterday I was welcomed as an Adobe Student Rep for Rich Internet Applications. I am excited to get the Flex community going at BYU and educating other students about what Adobe Flex is and what an RIA is. Since I do this for work, I find it is easy to share my passion and my love for it with others.

I created a user group for BYU students. If you are a … Continue Reading

Google Insights reveals that Utah searches the most for “adobe flex,” “flex 3,” “flex 2,” and “flex builder.”

Adobe Flex

Flex 3

Flex 2

Flex Builder

My buddy Bryce Barrand found that Orem is the Flex Capitol of Utah

My buddy John Anderson discovered that Utah is also #1 in search for web technologies such as PHP, CakePHP, MySQL, and Linux.

PHP

CakePHP

MySQL

Linux

Utah is definately one of the tech capitols of the United States.

Today I paid the $150 and took the Flex 2 certification test. I passed and am now an ACP – Adobe Certified Professional (add that to my Flash MX 2004 Certified Developer, MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) and MOUS (Microsoft Office User Specialist) certifications).

Overall I found the test to be challenging. I wouldn’t take it without sufficient preparation. Here are my Flex 2 study preparation tips:

1. Attest – provides practice tests and quizzes. Some questions on the official test came from the questions found on these practice tests.
2. Lynda Free 7 Day Trial
3. Flex 2 … Continue Reading
   

Today at work we rediscovered the Flash / Flex font size limit of 127px.

We are creating an RIA that needs the ability to scale down a large SVG to a web editor and then scale it back out for a print-ready SVG. Flex would take a 300 px font, convert it to a 127 px font, and then scale it down. This caused our textfields to be very small and inconsistent.

When attempting to load external compiled css swfs that have an embedded font into my flex application I was getting this error: Unable to load style(SWF is not a loadable module). This is reported as an official bug on adobe’s site at: Enable Local App to load RunTime CSS.swf from Server

To solve this, you require two things.

1. Crossdomain Policy
2. Local Apache Web Server

Regardless if this is a bug, the host server still needs a crossdomain policy at the root of the domain. Here’s an example crossdomain.xml policy.

The next problem is that you cannot load external compiled swfs … Continue Reading

Visit Adobe’s Press Release

On April 26, Adobe announced strategic plans to move the development of Flex to an open source model.

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create … Continue Reading